The Eternal in the Human Soul. Immortality and Freedom

Schmidt Number: S-3492

On-line since: 31st August, 2018

Mind, Soul and Body of the Human Being

Berlin, 28 February 1918

Someone who takes a popular or scientific book to search some
instructions about the relation of the human mind and soul to
the outer body can mostly find a sort of the following simile.
The sensory impressions that the human being receives from the
outside are as it were telegraphic news that is led to the
central station of the nervous system, to the brain, via the
nerves like wires and is sent out from there again into the
organism to evoke the will impulses and so on. Even if for some
people such a simile seems to be very likeable, one can say
that such a simile should only hide the helplessness compared
with the big riddle of mind and soul which one can enclose in
the words which should characterise the object of the today's
consideration: mind, soul and body of the human being.

Now
I have already indicated in the preceding talks that the
today's considerations in this area suffer from a basic lack.
Just if you position yourself with such a consideration on the
ground of the so successful scientific approach in other areas,
you cannot get over the prejudice that throws together the soul
life with the effectiveness of the real spiritual life in the
human being. Today soul and mind or spirit are confused almost
everywhere in scientific, in philosophical, and in popular
approaches.

That is why the investigations often remain infertile today
— apart from the fact that they are infertile of many
other reasons — because one does not want to renounce
from the prejudice that the human being can be considered
without envisaging his structure of three members: body, soul
and mind. I have also already indicated in a former talk that
spiritual science has to build a bridge from the soul to the
mind, as natural sciences have to build a bridge from the soul
life to the body. It is soul experience, in the broader sense,
undoubtedly — even if the soul experience is based in
this case also on the body — if the human being feels
hunger, thirst, saturation, respiratory need and the like.

However, even if you develop these sensations ever so much if
you try ever so much to increase or decrease the hunger to
observe it internally emotionally, or if you compare the
sensation of hunger to the saturation and the like, it is
impossible to find out for yourself by this mere inner
observation of the soul, which bodily bases are the conditions
of this soul experience. One has to build the bridge by the
known scientific methods in such a way that one goes over from
the mere soul experience to that which happens meanwhile in the
bodily organisation.

However, it is also impossible to get to any fertile view of
the human being as a spiritual being if one only wants to stop
with that what the human being experiences
internally-emotionally in his thinking, feeling and willing.
Mental pictures, feelings, will impulses are the contents of
the soul. They surge up and down in the everyday wake day life.
One tries to deepen them now and again by going over to a kind
of mystic contemplation. However, as far as one is able to go
with such a mystic contemplation, one cannot get to any
knowledge of the spirit by such mysticism. However, you have to
build the bridge from the mere soul experience to the spiritual
one if you strive for the knowledge of the spirit, as in the
area of the natural sciences the bridge is built from the soul
experience to the bodily processes which form the basis of the
sensations of hunger, saturation, of the respiratory need and
the like. However, you cannot consider the spiritual life of
the human being in same way as one goes over from the soul life
to the consideration of the bodily organisation. Other methods
are necessary there. I have pointed to these methods already in
a fundamental way. You find the details in my books How Does
One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?,Occult
Science. An Outline,The Riddle of Man, and in The
Riddles of the Soul, et cetera. However, I would
like to bring some noteworthy qualities of those methods
forward introductorily which can build the bridge from the
usual soul life to the spiritual nature of the human being.

There it concerns above all that just many psychologists of the
present believe that certain things are simply impossible which
spiritual science must absolutely intend. How often
psychologists say today that the real soul life cannot be
observed. One points to the fact that, for example, you cannot
observe tender feelings because they escape from you if you
want to observe them. One points out rightly that we feel
disturbed, for example, if we have memorised something, recite
it, and want to observe ourselves. This is shown in such a way,
as if it were a special peculiarity of the soul life. However,
just this is necessary to understand that that which is shown
there like an impossibility must be intended as
spiritual-scientific method. What the biologist what the
physiologist does for the body, the spiritual researcher does
for the mind, while he is anxious to ascend from the mere
everyday introspection and from the mere mystic introspection
to that true soul observation whose impossibility should be
asserted with the mentioned tip that we cannot observe
ourselves while reciting a poem because we are bothered about
it. It is not necessary that you get in such exterior things,
as reciting a memorised material, to a possibility of
introspection, although for someone who wants to become a
spiritual researcher it is also necessary.

However, it is inevitable that the spiritual researcher and
psychologist attains real introspection while he faces the
course of mental pictures and thoughts, also the course of will
impulses, of feelings really so that he is present like his own
spectator and learns to observe himself really, so that the
observer and the observed completely disintegrate. Some people
consider this possibility often as something very easy and
believe, while natural sciences use strict methods, spiritual
science is something that one can easily attain. However, to
real spiritual research methodically strict, patient, vigorous
progress is necessary in a way, not only as it happens in the
outer scientific area, but in such a way that someone who knows
both must say that compared with the often many years' pursuit
which is necessary to get to serious spiritual-scientific
results one can appropriate the methods of natural sciences
easier.

For
this true introspection, one creates a basis while one tries
quite methodically to lead the will into the mental pictures.
Thereby you come to meditation in the true sense of the word,
not in a dark, mystic sense. In our usual consciousness we are
not accustomed to such a meditative life at all, there the
thoughts completely follow the course of the outer world with
its impressions. Based on his experience of life or also of his
worldly wisdom he regulates his inner life, his train of
thought, so that he gets around to arranging his thoughts from
the inside. However, all that can be at most a preparation of
that which I mean here. This you have to attain in slow,
patient, vigorous work. You attain it while you bring such
regularity and still such arbitrariness into your thoughts that
you are sure: in that, which one practices in such a way
nothing works of memory, nothing of that can ascend from some
more or less forgotten mental pictures, experiences of life and
the like. Hence, it is necessary that someone who wants to get
to spiritual research settles in such a pursuit of mental
pictures which he arranges to himself in clear way, or receives
from there or there in clear way so that he can really say at
the moment in which he dedicates himself to this course of
mental pictures, I survey how I string the one mental picture
and the other how I influence the course of mental pictures by
my will.

All
that is nothing but a preparation of that which should happen,
actually, for the mental and spiritual life. Since, indeed,
this must be prepared carefully, but it appears in a certain
point of development as something objective, as a reality
coming from the spiritual outer world.

Only someone who dedicates himself carefully to such inner
exercises for a while brings about gradually if he has led
arbitrariness into the course of mental pictures and has
overcome it again to discover something internally which
strings one mental picture, one thought and the other together
from the spiritual area, and causes a soul life, controlled by
spiritual reality. As the outer observation regulates the
mental pictures and thereby brings in necessity, so that they
become mediators of the outer reality, the imagining life
gradually becomes a mediator of a spiritual reality. You have
to regard only just that which I mean here in the same sense as
something seriously scientific as natural sciences are. You
must not give yourself up to the prejudice that you get thereby
into any speculative fiction because you get, indeed, in inner
arbitrariness and realise that you can grasp something
spiritually real that approaches your imagination from the
other side than the side is which corresponds to the outer
physical reality. It is for someone who has not dealt much with
such things at first hard to imagine what I mean with these
things, actually. Only these things that should form the basis
of spiritual science are, like the scientific performances in
the laboratory et cetera, nothing but subtler developed
activities occurring in the outside world. These inner
activities of the spiritual researcher are nothing but the
continuation of that what also, otherwise, the soul life
accomplishes to produce the relationship between the soul life
and the spiritual life which is there always but which becomes
conscious by these exercises.

I
would like to take the starting point from something that can
be more comprehensible to characterise what I mean, actually.
Someone who deals with human or other living conditions is able
to find differences between the representations of the one
writer and the other if he gradually appropriates a sensation
for it. He will find with the one author that he can be right
with that what he says, that he can rather strictly use his
method that he is, however, far away from the nature of the
things by the way how he says the things. Against it, one can
often say with another author, he is simply by how he speaks
about the things a person who is close to the inner nature of
the things. It provides something that brings you surely to the
things. An example of it:

You
can have a lot against such an art appreciation as the author
Herman Grimm (18128-1901, art historian) practised it, but you
have to admit if you have a sensation of it, even if you often
do not agree with his explanations even if you find him
dilettantish: in his explanations is something by which you are
acquainted with the pieces of art, with the artists, even with
their personal characters.

This atmosphere in his writings immediately leads to the being
of that about which he speaks. You can put the question to
yourself: how does such an author get around to differing just
in such typical way from others? For someone who is not used to
talking about such things in the abstract just the following
can arise. You find some sentences, for example, at a place
where he speaks in a very nice article about Raphael, which may
probably sound irritating to pedantic, sober scholars. There he
says what you would feel according to his opinion if you met
Raphael today, and how you would feel quite different if you
met Michelangelo today. — Speaking such stuff in a
scientific treatise is for some people daydreaming from the
start, isn't that so? Of course, one can absolutely understand
such a judgement. You find such weird remarks with Herman Grimm
at numerous places. One would like to say, he dedicates himself
to certain connections of mental pictures from the start about
which he knows of course that they cannot become immediate
reality, and wants to say nothing special about the outer
reality with such remarks. However, someone who has dedicated
himself repeatedly to such lines of thought would realise
— indeed, now not in this area, because in this area such
lines of thought lead to nothing at all — probably in
other areas that his soul forces were set in motion so that he
can behold deeper into the things and can express them more
accurately than others do who despise to do such
“unnecessary” lines of thought.

That matters, and I would like to emphasise it. If you do lines
of thought in your inside to produce these lines of thought
only, to put your thinking in motion, so that it has a possible
relationship with reality, and if you refrain from wanting
something else with these lines of thought than to bring your
thinking in a certain current of development, then your
thinking, your soul faculties become nimbler at first. Then the
fruit of it appears in quite different areas of consideration.
You have to separate both strictly. Someone who is not able to
do this gets to pipe dreams, to all kinds of hypotheses.
However, to someone who has the self-control to know exactly
that such activation of the thinking has only subjective
meaning at first who puts the power from such activity of the
thinking in motion in the soul, the fruits of it appear at
another time. Taking this as starting point Herman Grimm could
make historical remarks in his treatises about Macaulay
(Thomas Babington M., 1800-1859, British historian, poet and
politician), Frederick
the Great (1712-1786, Prussian king since 1740) and
others which remind of that what spiritual science has to say
about the life of the soul and the mind. I do not want to say
with it that Herman Grimm was already a spiritual researcher;
he just rejects this. I also do not want to say with it that
that what I have characterised with him is more than something
that can already take place in the usual consciousness. While
you develop such a thing and practise it on and on, you lead
the will into the imagining and you grasp the spiritual
necessity in the imagining.

However, one has to add something else. I have already pointed
to the fact that it is important in the development of the
spiritual researcher that he can dedicate himself to the
so-called limiting points of cognition. Du
Bois-Reymond (Emil D. B.-R., 1818-1896, German
physician and physiologist) speaks of seven world riddles as
limiting points beyond which the human cognition cannot get.
Two points form just the starting point of spiritual-scientific
investigations. The one is that you feel in the inner life at
first what is said with such a border issue, actually. I like
to point with pleasure to persons on such occasion who really
strive for knowledge. As an example, I cite Friedrich
Theodor Vischer (1807-1887, German aesthetician). When
this treated the important subject of human dream fantasies, he
came to such a border issue. He said to himself, if I look at
the relation of the soul life to the body life, it is most
certain that the soul cannot be in the body, but it is as
certain that the soul cannot be somewhere beyond the body.
Someone who develops such a thinking which does not strive for
knowledge according to common methods, but according to inner
necessary currents of the soul life, has often to say to
himself, you are at a point where all mental pictures which are
due to the sensory observations, to the whole conscious life do
not get you anywhere. Now you can stop at such limiting points
and say, well, there is just a border, beyond which the human
being cannot come. You are mistaken, while you say this.
However, about that I do not want to speak.

The
point is that you try just in such limiting points to penetrate
with your complete soul life that you try to settle in a real
contradiction that shows the spiritual-mental reality as an
outer inconsistent reality appears if a plant once shows a
green leaf, some other time a yellow petal. In reality, the
contradictions also come into being. If you experience them
instead of approaching them with your usual logical thinking if
you approach them with the full living inner soul being if you
let a contradiction live out in the soul and do not approach it
with the prejudice of life and want to dissolve it, you notice
how it increases, how something really appears there that you
can compare to the following, as I have done in my book
The
Riddles of the Soul.

If
a lower living being has no sense of touch at first, but only
an inner surging life, and gradually stumbles against the
outside world, that what was before only inner surging life
changes into the sense of touch. That is a usual scientific
idea. Then the sense of touch differentiates again, so that as
it were by the collision of the inner life with the outside
world the latter becomes inner experience. You can apply this
picture of the sense of touch to that mental-spiritual
experience which the spiritual researcher has to go through. He
lets such limiting points of cognition live out in his soul.
Then it is in such a way, as if the inner life is not
confronted with a physical outside world, but with a spiritual
world and a spiritual sense of touch, which then differentiates
further and wants to become what one can call spiritual eyes,
spiritual ears figuratively. However, it is far from any
preoccupation with such border issues of cognition up to that
what I have called beholding consciousness in my book
The Riddle of Man. However, one can develop this
beholding consciousness.

One
has to consider this one thing. The other is that you find out
just with such an inner spiritual-mental activity that you
cannot penetrate into the spiritual world with the faculty of
judgement that you have gained in the sensory world, not even
in the negative sense that one says that the human cognition
cannot get beyond itself at this point. You have rather to
refrain from penetrating into the spiritual world, before you
have prepared yourself by these and similar exercises to
penetrate really into the spiritual world. For a certain
resignation, a certain renunciation belongs to it. While as a
rule the human being is used to putting up hypotheses and all
kinds of logical conclusions about that what could be or not be
beyond the physical experience, the spiritual researcher has
not only to get to an inner conviction, but to an inner
intellectual virtue not to use for the characteristic of the
spiritual world what comes only from the physical-sensory
reality. You have to appropriate this renunciation first; it
must become a habitual soul quality. Then you bring yourself to
the knowledge that the soul has to make itself ripe for it
first to penetrate into the spiritual world. This virtue also
supports the introduction of the will into the imagining life
as I have described it. This brings you to the point where you
can practise that introspection of which I have spoken just
now, with which you can really be your own spectator, while the
thoughts, feelings, and will impulses are proceeding.

Only by such true introspection, the human being develops a
spiritual activity about which he knows by experience that it
is performed not with the help of the body because the human
being with his true ego is now beyond the body. This mental
picture is quite unusual admittedly. Since everything of the
other worldviews tends to deny the possibility that the human
being can develop a soul life which is independent of the body.
If in this way the results of the introspection are stated, one
criticises them with that which one has gained in the outer.
One cannot cope with it. One creates misunderstandings about
misunderstandings simply because any spiritual research is
based on something opposite that forms the basis of the
scientific way of thinking. There the thinking and the
methodical development of thinking is so organised in
experiments et cetera that the human being applies the
scientific methods that are developed with the faculty of
judgement and the reason to learn nature's secrets. This is
quite natural on the ground of the scientific way of thinking.
One uses the same power of thinking and imagining to develop
all kinds of scientific methods in spiritual science to prepare
the soul first, so that it can observe the results of spiritual
science.

This serves to prepare the soul, so that it can observe the
phenomena of the soul life in a way that is free from the body.
The human being can thereby advance from the soul to the spirit
as he advances from the soul to the body with scientific
methods. So that you can say, already the whole way of the
proving and judging thinking must become different in spiritual
science. It must not be absent, but what one reaches with it is
the ability of observing because one has applied the methods of
the outer science to the development of the soul first.

Thus in the beginning the spiritual researcher prepares himself
with the same means with which science gets, otherwise, to its
results, to be able to observe spiritually. Thereby that
originates what I reluctantly call clairvoyant beholding of the
spiritual world, reluctantly because even today one points
often to older unusual soul conditions and confuses the strict
serious method of spiritual science intentionally or
accidentally with all kinds of pathological and dilettantish
methods if one speaks of the clairvoyant beholding of the outer
world. About such things, I will speak in detail in the talk on
the Revelations of the Unconscious.

Now
one can observe the soul life in such a way that the
observation does not stop only at the soul experience, but
points to the spirit. I would like to mention two
quintessential points at first. While the human being gets to
true introspection which is carried out beyond the body and
thereby faces the spirit, he attains a view not only of the
relationship of the usual wake state to the usual sleep as an
immediate result of observation but above all of that what the
phenomena of awakening and falling asleep are. It is still the
destiny of spiritual science today that it speaks not only of
unknown things, but that it has to speak in quite different way
about that what is involved in the consciousness of every human
being.

One
has to add to this that spiritual science must use words that
are coined for the usual life. This causes some difficulties
because spiritual science must use the same words now and again
already in another direction. It has to go back to known
phenomena of life to be able to illuminate the spiritual realm
starting from them. The human being knows the alternating
conditions of sleeping and waking if one speaks from the point
of consciousness at first, on one side as the time in which the
consciousness exists from awakening up to falling asleep, and
on the other side the time in which the consciousness has
disappeared in darkness, in the sleeping consciousness. The
spiritual researcher knows that it is so weak that one normally
speaks of the absence of the consciousness in sleep. Now, these
both alternating conditions are suitable to move some way into
the riddle of the human being already by a realistic
consideration. From the start, it must strike everybody that
the real human being cannot begin with falling asleep and
awakening anew. The mental-spiritual being of the human being
which lives, otherwise, while awake as a consciousness must
also exist in sleep. However, for the usual consciousness the
thing is in such a way that the human being cannot consider
himself in sleep that he cannot compare, hence, the waking
state to the sleeping state internally spiritually. Externally
scientifically, it is another matter. Now it concerns that one
gets closer to these things if one really ascends from the
usual sensory observation to the spiritual observation in such
a way that one envisages thinking, feeling, and willing.

We
turn our attention upon the imagining and thinking at first.
The human being considers it as a rule in such a way that he
knows: I am awake from awakening to falling asleep. My thoughts
position themselves in my usual awake life. The usual
consciousness cannot get to another judgement. It is different
if the soul life has prepared itself with such exercises to a
spiritual observation. Then one can observe this inner
expansion world, the awake consciousness generally from
awakening to falling asleep. It is strange, that here serious
naturalists meet with that what spiritual science brings to
light from another side. However, natural sciences can only
build a bridge to the soul life going out from the
investigation of the body. They refuse even today to speak
about that about which I speak here. Hence, the naturalists
speak another language than the spiritual researcher does.
However, the things are to be found. Thus interesting
investigations have appeared, for example, recently in
scientific area by the researcher Julius Pikler (1864-1952,
Hungarian physician, politician) who envisages the awake
consciousness quite unlike one was used in biology up to now.
Of course, he does not examine such a thing
spiritual-scientifically. Hence, he takes something as basis
that is not more than a word. Pikler speaks of a “drive
of waking” which keeps the human being alert up to
falling asleep, which is there, even if no special thoughts and
mental pictures are there which is said to appear as such in
particular in boredom. I wanted to point to it only to show
that also from the other side one works on it.

Spiritual science cannot simply take any term or any
hypothetical force as basis where a phenomenon exists but has
to observe it. Indeed, it observes what the human soul
experiences while awake. It observes the steady flow of the
conscious day life from awakening up to falling asleep. It
finds the way in particular if it observes the intrusion of
thoughts and mental pictures in this simple waking state with
its methods of observation. There arises for the spiritual
researcher that the usual waking state is interrupted by a
partial falling asleep in the experience of thoughts. We wake
in such a way that we perpetually lower the waking state to
partial sleeping, while we move the mental pictures into the
waking state. We get to know the relation of the soul to the
imagining life only because we can observe how the usually
intensive waking state is not diminished as strongly as in the
dreamless sleep and the thought which may be evoked by a
perception falls into this decrease every time. We do not
experience the usual waking state in a steady intensity, but it
is diminished perpetually if we grasp thoughts. What exists,
otherwise, more or less dulled in sleep continues into the
awake life. Thereby you become able to differentiate what you
usually have as a coloured succession of mental pictures while
awake. What one knows, otherwise, as waking and sleeping of
equal intensity, you have to learn to imagine with different
degrees of intensity. You must be able to observe the complete
waking state, the weakened waking state, the complete sleeping
state, the weakened sleeping state and so on.

Thus, you get to know gradually what one does not consider,
otherwise, in the consciousness. Thereby one can also envisage
the waking state independently by observation to which the
spiritual eye must be created first. Then you need no proofs of
what you see, but you just behold it. There you become able to
regard a view as right, as given by experience about which the
present psychology speaks exceptionally seldom. However, once a
psychologist spoke very nicely, whom one appreciates too
little.

Here you are at one of those points, which are so interesting
for the development of spiritual research. This is not
something new, but something that should be built up only in a
systematic roundup for which the beginnings have already
appeared with those who struggled with knowledge. Fortlage
(Karl F., 1806-1881, German philosopher) speaks about it once,
and Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906, philosopher)
reproves him, that, actually, the usual consciousness is dying
perpetually. It is a weird, courageous assertion, which is to
be confirmed scientifically, although natural sciences
interpret the concerning facts wrongly; read, for example, the
investigations of Kassowitz (Max K., 1842-1913, Austrian
paediatrician).

Fortlage realises that that by which consciousness originates
is not only based on the growing life, but that just if the
conscious life appears in the soul this life must die in the
human organism, so that we carry death through our whole
conscious life partially in ourselves. While we form mental
pictures, something is destroyed in our nervous system that,
however, immediately regenerates again. Development follows
destruction again. The conscious soul life is based on
destructive processes. Fortlage says, if the partial death that
always appears in a part of the body, in the brain, while
forming the consciousness, seized the whole body each time as
the physical death does it, the human being would have to die
perpetually. As to Fortlage the physical death only expresses
itself as a whole once what the consciousness is perpetually
based on.

Hence, Fortlage can hypothetically conclude because he does not
yet have the spiritual beholding that we deal with a partial
death each time, if our usual consciousness appears, that the
general death is the merging of a consciousness into other
conditions, which the human being develops for the spiritual
world after death. There appears like a silver lining in no
uncertain manner what spiritual science develops more and more
exactly. Science shows that the whole nature of the human being
that is considered rightly from the viewpoint of evolution
today must not only considered from this viewpoint. Now I do
not expand this consideration beyond the human being; we shall
thoroughly speak later about nature where we can enter into
such questions.

If
one stops at the human being, one has to consider him in such a
way that one knows that a development of growing life takes
place, but perpetually also a destructive process, a retrograde
development. The organs of this destructive process are mainly
in the nervous system. The mental consciousness intervenes in
the human being while it lets the processes of growing
alternate with destructive processes. The whole awake life from
the awakening up to falling asleep is based on the fact that
with the awakening the mental-spiritual that has separated with
falling asleep from the body immerses in the body and that what
is progressive development from falling asleep up to awakening
changes into retrograde development in the nervous system.

While the human being is thinking, he has to destroy, he must
cause death processes in his nerves to make way for the work of
the spiritual-mental. Natural sciences will confirm this more
and more from the other side. The spiritual researcher advances
from the spiritual-mental to the bodily and shows that, while
with the awakening the spiritual-mental flows into the bodily,
destruction takes place, until the destruction has advanced so
far that the progressive development must appear with the
beginning of sleep again. The evenly progressive waking state
is based on the fact that by the mental-spiritual in the human
body repeatedly a proper, a legitimate destructive process
takes place, contrary to that current which lives in the usual
waking which is active in the forces which let us as children
grow and thrive. If we put the imagining, the thinking in the
usual waking state, we work the other way again.

There we bring parts of development, partial states of sleep
into the destructive process from the bodily development, so
that we can say: it is weakened by processes which represent
quite weakly what exists in the growth, that state which
extends about the usual awake life because it is destroyed. The
spiritual researcher realises now that this destruction, this
continuously progressing process from the awakening up to
falling asleep is the effect of the spirit in the human being.
Spirit destroys, and within this destruction, those activities
of imagining and thinking assert themselves in which the soul
uses the constructive processes to put them in the spiritual
destructive processes. Here we see mind, soul, and body
intertwining. The spiritual researcher does not want to speak
about the spiritual-mental in a dilettantish way and to
disregard that what happens in the body, just because he
himself observes that the spirit does not work in such a way
that it expresses the processes of growth, of development,
which are wholly physical processes, but these contrary
processes. While the spiritual researcher gets to know that
what the mind accomplishes on the body, he also gets to know
again how the soul uses the bodily processes to diminish the
spiritual processes, while it moves the mental pictures into
the destructive process that the mind performs.

As
well as the spiritual researcher on one side recognises in the
mental pictures which are involved in the usual waking state a
partial falling asleep, he learns to recognise on the other
side that every time a will impulse positions itself in the
soul life, this appears like an increase of the waking state.
Thinking, imagining is like a reduction of the waking state,
the will impulse is like an awakening of that state which
prevails from the awakening up to falling asleep in relation to
the will life that is so vague that one can call it a sleeping
life even if one is waking. What does the human being know,
while he carries out any will impulse, what proceeds in his
arm? It is like an awakening every time a will impulse
emerges.

With it, I have indicated how the real observer who has
ascended to the true introspection can understand the work of
the human soul forces and mental powers in the spiritual. While
he advances with his methods further, he can get to know that
ego that he experiences in this introspection with which he
just does the introspection. This ego does not reveal itself to
philosophical speculations; one can only experience it. If it
is experienced, one gets to know by immediate view what I have
now characterised sketchily. The human being with his usual
consciousness cannot help believing, envisaging the forces of
growing only, that gradually from the bodily developmental
processes that develops which is expressed in the mental as
ego. Someone who gets to know the ego by true introspection
realises that this is a fallacy — but it is a necessary
fallacy for the usual consciousness.

There you learn to recognise that that what happens in the body
in the ongoing developmental processes relates to the true ego
as the lung to the air. As little the lung produces the air, as
little the human body creates the ego anyhow. Only as long as
one does not know the real spiritual-mental, one commits the
necessary fallacy that this ego has anything to do with the
body.

However, the spiritual researcher leaves the body with his
methods while investigating the ego, as well as that who wants
to look at the air has to leave the lung. Thus, the spiritual
researcher recognises by real observation that this self, this
spiritual-mental of the human being, enters the physical body
at birth, at conception respectively that he gets from the line
of heredity. He recognises that this ego, which descends from
the spiritual world, receives the body that the body inhales
this ego, and the human being exhales it again if he dies. This
is a pictorial expression how the spiritual-mental that
descends from the spiritual world is connected with the
physical-bodily.

Just then, however, an essential differentiation of the
spiritual and the mental arises for the spiritual researcher
also with the transition of the human being to the
mental-spiritual surroundings in which he lives with that part
of his being that goes through birth and death which is the
everlasting, immortal in the human being compared with the
transient body. This difference of the mental and the spiritual
arises because we learn to recognise something in the mental
which breaks away from the human being that is as it were only
a died away keynote of that which you experience, otherwise, as
thinking, feeling and willing. I would like to express myself
as follows: we take a chanted song. We can regard the words of
the song as a poem at first and can continue this consideration
in listening the chanted song. However, we can also refrain
from the contents of the words while singing and can pay
attention to the music only. You can grasp the whole experience
of the human being in thinking, feeling, and willing in such a
way that you can also grasp an undercurrent there if you do not
go into the contents of thinking, feeling, and willing.

To
express myself even more clearly, I would like to characterise
the matter still from another side. You all know that certain
Asian people ascend to the spiritual-mental by methods about
which I have said in my talks and books repeatedly that they
are not applicable to our western cultural development in the
same way that here we have to apply other methods to the
conscious spiritual research. However, I may adduce something
as comparison. You know that the Asian human beings get to a
certain cognition of the soul because they recite mantras over
and over again. One laughs in the West at the repetitions in
the speeches of Buddha and does not know that for the Eastern
human beings this repetition of certain sentences is a
necessity because thereby just a certain undercurrent is
attained in the inner absorption of the matter, disregarding
the immediate contents. One hears music living in the soul with
these mantras. The soul puts itself in such a thing. In my
books, you can find that we do that in the Western spiritual
development in a more spiritual-mental way that we do not
resort to such a repeated singing or speaking of mantras.
However, what is attained there in other way can be explained
by the fact that one points out that one witnesses an
undercurrent in thinking, feeling, and willing.

If
one resorts to the full introspection, maintaining the contents
of thinking, feeling and willing, as you have it in the usual
awake consciousness, you discover the work of the spirit the
easiest. Against it the mental is something more intimate, it
often escapes from you. You have to do quite difficult and
lengthy exercises if you want to find out it. While you can
find out relatively easily that the spirit is destructive in
the ongoing waking state, you have to apply subtler, more
intimate exercises to observe that the emerging mental pictures
are partial sleeping states. However, if you get to this more
intimate experience in the soul, you also get from the mere
subjective soul life to the objective soul life. Then you do
not pursue the spiritual-mental only in that spiritual realm in
which the human being lives between death and a new birth, now
in a wholly spiritual experience, but you can pursue the mental
in its state before birth and in its postmortal state. As
strange as it still sounds to the modern human being, one can
find out these things. Due to this experience which the
Oriental develops just in a way which is so close to the
intimate soul life he realised sooner than the Westerner did
that the whole human soul life takes place in repeated lives on
earth that the repeated lives on earth really result from
observation.

It
is an observation result of the mental experience. To
experience the imperishable that goes through births and deaths
in its spirituality is something else than this mental
experience as it appears in the repeated lives on earth. It is
like a specialisation of the spiritual experience.

As
one sees the imagining being involved in the single human being
as partial sleeping, one can observe in the outer world how in
that spiritual realm, which one discovers as a scene of the
everlasting spiritual in the human being, the mental is
involved, while it specifies the general-everlasting spiritual
life in repeated lives on earth. Those have begun once and will
end once. I speak about that in the next talk.

You
attain that by the real development of the mental abilities
that not everybody needs to appropriate. However, every human
being has the sense for truth. Unless prejudices cloud your
sense for truth, you can agree with that which the spiritual
researcher has to say, also before you yourself have become a
spiritual researcher. Since the seer differs from other people
as someone differs who watches the watchmaker from that who
sees the clock only. He who sees the clock knows that it has
originated from the intellectual activity of the watchmaker; he
does not need watching the watchmaker. While the spiritual
researcher describes from his research by visionary observation
how that comes about what is in the everyday life, someone who
observes this immediately will find the said confirmed
everywhere, even if he himself is no spiritual researcher.

Even if this appears as something paradox in the general
cultural development how the spiritual researcher has to think
about body, soul and mind of the human being, that will also
arise to spiritual research in the course of time — while
natural sciences work from the other side on that what
spiritual research has to say — what has arisen for
natural sciences slowly and gradually. Consider only that there
was a time when certain prejudices prevented the emergence of
modern physiology and biology. In a similar way one has a
prejudice to build the bridge from the human soul life to that
what proceeds in the human body, while the soul life takes
place. The study of anatomy became also only possible in the
course of the Middle Ages. Before a prejudice was an obstacle
to add that what happens there in the body to that what the
soul can experience inwardly. Today spiritual science is in the
same position. Even if one does not believe it, the today's
prejudices are of the same value and come from the same causes.
As in the Middle Ages one did not want to permit that bodies
were dissected to recognise that what happens in them as a
condition of the soul life, the most serious scientists are
reluctant even today to investigate the spirit with
spiritual-scientific methods. As the Middle Ages got around
gradually to releasing the scientific investigation of the
human body, the cultural development will also involve that the
investigation of the spirit which is not identical with the
soul is released to spiritual science.

Whether one goes to scientifically minded human beings, whether
one goes to other psychologists and comes with
spiritual-scientific results, one experiences the same, only in
another field, what the biography of Galilei tells.

Up
to Galilei's times the prejudice prevailed which continued by
an ambiguous conception of Aristotle during the whole Middle
Ages that the nerves arise from the heart. Galilei said to a
friend that this were a prejudice. The friend was a strictly
religious follower of Aristotle. He said, what I can read in
Aristotle is true, and there you can read that the nerves arise
from the heart. Then Galilei showed him at a corpse that the
nerves arise from the brain, not from the heart that Aristotle
had not recognised this because such anatomical studies were
not yet usual. However, the follower of Aristotle remained
unbelieving. Although he realised that the nerves arise from
the brain, he said, indeed, the appearance militates for you,
but Aristotle says something different, and if a contradiction
is between Aristotle and nature, I do not trust nature but
Aristotle. This happened really.

Still today, it is this way. Go to those who want to found
psychic research in the old sense from a philosophical
viewpoint, go to those who want to found psychic research
scientifically, they state that one has anyhow to explain that
from the psychic only which forms the basis of the soul
phenomena coming from the mind or the body. If one points ever
so much to facts of spiritual observation, one answers out of
the same spirit, if a contradiction exists between that which
Wundt
(Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, philosopher, physiologist,
psychologist) or Paulsen
(Friedrich P., 1846-1908, German philosopher and educator) or
any authority say and that which spiritual science shows by
spiritual observation, then we do not trust spiritual
observation but that which one can read in the books to which
we are accustomed in this time without authority. Since today
one does no longer believe in authorities, but — indeed,
in such a way that one does not notice it — in that which
is officially labelled anyhow. Spiritual science will struggle
through as well as natural sciences struggled through
concerning the investigation of the body.

Naturalists like Du Bois-Reymond and others state that where
the supersensible begins science must stop. I have already
pointed in a former talk to the fallacy that happens there.
Where from did it originate? Indeed, one felt — and Du
Bois-Reymond felt rather clearly — that the human being
is rooted in something spiritual. However, one must recognise
this spiritual only by development of spiritual-scientific
methods as the ground from which the mental of the human being
originates. Modern science wants to make the things clear,
while it envisages that what one can perceive with the senses;
since the roots in the spiritual ground escape from it. Science
does it like somebody who digs out a tree to face it clearly.
Then he faces it clearly but the tree withers. Thus, modern
science has dug out the tree of knowledge. However, just as the
tree dug out from its ground dries up, knowledge also dries up
which one digs out of the spiritual ground. Such a sentence
like that of Du Bois-Reymond that science stops where the
supersensible begins will be linked up to the contrary
conviction in future. One will recognise, if one does not want
to recognise the supersensible down to the natural phenomena,
one removes the tree of knowledge from its topsoil and makes
knowledge dry up. One does not say in future where the
supersensible begins, science stops, but one experiences if one
wants to found knowledge in the way that one takes out it from
the spiritual ground that where in the human spiritual life the
supersensible stops science cannot prosper that there a real
science cannot originate beyond the supersensible, but that
where the supersensible stops a dead science will only be.